By Richard D. Smith l 09/22/2021
“Give me five good ones!” Alex Obe cheerfully admonished a group of fit and energetic people.
But Obe wasn’t talking about pushups, and this wasn’t an exercise class. It was Monday, September 6th, and Obe was hoping for at least five exercise bikes that hadn’t been destroyed when the adjacent Millstone River inundated his Iron Core Fitness gym in Rocky Hill.
Alex Obe, owner of the Iron Core Fitness gym in Rocky Hill, cleans up after the flood. (Photos by Richard D. Smith.)
A deluge of friends, customers, and neighbors emerged to lift dumbbells, kettlebells, and barbell plates. They rinsed the mud from the equipment and neatly organized the items inside the building.
“Alex will want us to postpone it all again,” joked one team member, knowing the others were smiling. “It’s all a trick to get us to practice!”
Nature played the real trick on September 1st when the remnants of Hurricane Ida caused a brutal weather event in the mid-Atlantic region and floods flooded Obe’s Iron Core gym.
Iron Core Gym on Route 518 surrounded by 3 to 4 feet of water.
In response, about 50 people – Alex’s fitness clients, parents of first graders at Montgomery School tutored by Ms. Stephanie Shaffer Obe, and friends and neighbors – willingly abandoned plans for the Labor Day holiday to join a inflated cleaning work to work.
“We knew how much work they put into the gym, what sacrifices they made,” explains Alexis Soron from Montgomery, who was there with husband Nate and their two teenage children, all of whom are good friends of the Obe family.
About 50 people came on Labor Day to help the Obe family clean up their gym after the flood.
“People just kept popping up,” says Rocky Hill’s Johnny Rooney, a teacher friend at Montgomery School with Stephanie Obe. “All hands were on deck!”
Alex Obe (pronounced oh-BAY), 44, is of Nigerian descent. He and his sister were born in the United States but lived in Nigeria during their childhood. Her mother worked for Nigerian Airlines; her father was an entrepreneur in computer and alarm systems businesses. Alex and Stephanie met as students at Bucknell University. Both graduated in 1999, he in psychology and she in education.
Alex worked in corporate information systems for a while. But “Fitness always felt good, it felt right,” he says and adds with a smile, “I had to make people sweat.”
He worked for the New York Sports Club chain and eventually ran two locations including the Princeton Shopping Center. In 2006 he bought Personal Training Studios in the Business Center at Rt. 206 from ShopRite, later in the nearby Research Park complex.
The sale of PTS in 2019 enabled the purchase of 200 Washington Road in Rocky Hill – originally an 18th century flour mill (The Obes were residents of Rocky Hill after moving from Hamilton in 2009.)
Stephanie Shaffer Obe has been teaching in the Montgomery Township school system since 2000, initially as a substitute and now as a full-time first grade teacher. (“She’s very respected,” says Johnny Rooney. “Parents and children just love her.”)
The Obe family was in Jamaica when the Rocky Hill storm broke and the Millstone billowed up. (It was kind of like a work vacation for Alex, who was doing workouts there.) News quickly spread on social media that Iron Core Fitness had been flooded. A happier flood of friends and acquaintances followed asking for help.
Kim Toedtman from Montgomery helps clean and sort the medicine balls.
It was Stephanie who suggested that her husband “really say you need help”. And Alex, who is a tough do-it-yourself guy, did that via text messages and Facebook posts. (Your children also got a message to friends.)
Johnny Rooney, Mrs. Angie, and their two children answered. “That was such a great event,” he says. “It was such a ‘community’ for a very good family that is so loved and respected.”
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Alexis Soron of Belle Mead, who trained with Alex, added, “It was a daunting task. But there were so many people there and everyone was working so hard that everything was done quickly. It was wonderful.”
Alexis first met Stephanie (who later taught her son in first grade) through mutual friends. She trained personally with Alex and also participated in his virtual workouts during the coronavirus quarantine.
“He really cares about everyone who shows up on his courses,” she says. “That’s why there was such participation. He deserves to be successful. “
Several interviewees compared the Iron Core Fitness Purge to the end of the classic Christmas movie It’s A Wonderful Life, in which a community rallies to rescue a beloved family-owned savings and credit bank threatened by a sudden crisis.
“It was unbelievable and humiliating,” says Alex Obe, “because I didn’t expect it.”
